Megan

My family only moved once when I was growing up--at age eleven, when everything in life is going so well anyways that getting uprooted from your neighborhood in something that passes for country in the Chicago suburbs and plopped down all of ten miles away in the middle of a legitimate urban center, well, that's just the arsenic laced cherry topping on the crap pile that was my hormone-ridden life. Mom and Dad's reasoning was all very sound, of course. Location, location, location--proximity to a "great school and the best"--I don't even know and I certainly didn't care. It only ended up being three years before my old friends and I were all dumped in the same high school anyway, and we all got back to normal, but there was no convincing us of that at the time. The week before we moved, Emily head me over for one last sleepover. I thought it'd be an idyllic, movie-montage-memory-sequence of all our good times--the laughter, the tears--but it turned out to be an audition of sorts for my replacement. A whole night with me, Em, and a bunch of girls whom I didn't know, barely liked, who were far more interested in the romantic entanglements of the Backstreet Boys than I ever was, and who, it therefore followed, would be a far better best friend to Emily than I ever was. Em definitely got the better end of that deal. I saw Em and Megan--that's who she ended up with, Megan (said with an appropriate mixture of awe and disgust)--those three years later, the first day of freshman year. They wore matching pleated skirts and sported bouncy high ponytails. I wore khaki pants and my ponytail looked like someone had cut the tail off a rat and stitched it to the base of my neck. Clearly Tweedle Dum and Tweedle...Dee really found each other. You thought I was gonna say Tweedle Dummer, didn't you? Yeah? Yeah? I'm not that mean. I mean, she was my friend. I even hate the name Megan. Megan. Who names their kid that? Megan. Megan. Ah, who am I kidding? It's a lovely name. Megan. Crap.